Monday, July 30, 2007

Sunday, July 29, 2007

Just some pictures of Jewish interest I've snapped on my way here and there, mostly with my cellphone.A kosher pizza store in Lakewood. The sign is vague, ominous, and includes a threat but no specifics- no time or date or even how much more my mushroom and onion on whole wheat is gonna cost. The Department of Homeland Security needs to hire these guys to do PR.Dougie's parking lot in Woodbourne, New York. The sign, in Yiddish, says 'No Littering'.'And thou shall eat, and thou shall be satiated, and thou shall bless thy L-rd- and thou shall pay thine tab'. Milk and Honey Bistro, Baltimore MD.One of these things just doesn't belong here... one of these things just isn't the same.B.B. King, Marvine Gaye, Eric Clapton, Steppenwolf, James Brown, and... Sisqo. Adding insult to injury, the sign said something like "best music of the 20th Century" (I'm paraphrasing here). WalMart, Howell, NJ.I'm not sure if this is a sculpture meant to represent the spirit of industry or a pile of crap some contractor left behind by mistake after the building was done. Outside the National Aquarium at Baltimore, Baltimore MD

Okay, those last two had little or nothing to do with Judaism, except that all Jews are snarky wiseguys who have to criticize everything. If you don't like it, get your own blog.

Thursday, July 19, 2007

Passaic City officials and the director of a Jewish ambulance service are addressing new tensions that have erupted following a clash with police who attempted to tow an ambulance this week. On Sunday, resident David Kaplan, 25, who founded the local branch of Hatzolah, an international ambulance corps staffed by volunteers in many Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods, confronted police who had ticketed an ambulance parked the wrong way on Reid Avenue. The site is around the corner from Hatzolah headquarters at 243 Van Houten Ave. A group of people congregated in front of the ambulance about 11 a.m. as five police cars and a tow truck arrived at the scene, Kaplan said. The tow-truck operator was unable to move the ambulance because of its size, he said.

Hah. Whaddya wanna bet the cops called the tow truck guy to the scene and the tow truck guy made up some excuse so he wouldn't have to tow a freaking ambulance, because people need ambulances to not die.

Mayor Samuel Rivera said he was on the scene Sunday and thought the ambulance volunteers acted "belligerently" and that perhaps police responded too harshly.

I'd be belligerent too, if someone was trying to tow my piece of vital lifesaving equipment. And, perhaps, the police responded too harshly? If the cops would have summarily executed everyone at the scene and set the ambulance on fire as a warning to others, that would have been way out of line, but just confiscating a volunteer medical unit is, maybe, a little too harsh. Depending on your perspective, of course.

"They were going to be towed because they were parked in a dangerous position," Rivera said.

That dangerous position: parked the wrong way on a one way street, which is something everybody does, even people not driving emergency response vehicles.

Rivera said he met Monday with Kaplan and Paton to try to resolve friction between police and the volunteers. "I'm trying to work with them. My goal is for them to work with our [the city's] EMS," Rivera said, adding that part of the frustration with Hatzolah goes back more than two years.

Which sure sounds like an unbiased statement to me.

In addition, the city has offered Hatzolah use of city EMS headquarters to park Hatzolah's ambulances, but Hatzolah has rejected the city's offer, Rivera said. "They say they like to have ambulances parked closer to the Jewish community," Rivera said.

How dare those uppity Jews want to park their ambulance close to where it's needed! The gall!

Monday, July 02, 2007

A giant black-and-white rodent — named "Farfour," or "butterfly," but unmistakably a Mickey ripoff — does his high-pitched preaching against the U.S. and Israel on a children's show run each Friday on Al-Aqsa TV, a station run by Hamas. The militant group, sworn to Israel's destruction, shares power in the Palestinian government. "You and I are laying the foundation for a world led by Islamists," Farfour squeaked on a recent episode of the show, which is titled, "Tomorrow's Pioneers." "We will return the Islamic community to its former greatness, and liberate Jerusalem, God willing, liberate Iraq, God willing, and liberate all the countries of the Muslims invaded by the murderers."

Hamas TV on Friday broadcast what it said was the last episode of a weekly children's show featuring "Farfur," a Mickey Mouse look-alike who had made worldwide headlines for preaching Islamic domination and armed struggle to youngsters. In the final skit, Farfur was beaten to death by an actor posing as an Israeli official trying to buy Farfur's land. At one point, Farfur called the Israeli a "terrorist." "Farfour was martyred while defending his land," said Sara, the teen presenter. He was killed "by the killers of children," she added.

Wonderful.

That is all kinds of messed up, right there.

My theory on what happened: Disney's legendary legal department must have caught up with these guys, and they just decided to cease and desist themselves.

Sunday, July 01, 2007

I was in the mall with Mrs Chainik Friday, just chillaxin. We bought some maternity stuff, and I am just going to have to take my wife's word for it that simply buying normal stuff in larger sizes will not be sufficient.

While we were there, we passed by a group of hippies sitting in lawn chairs in front of the Gymboree. This confused me, as I hadn't heard that Phish was reuniting and playing the Freehold Raceway Mall (which has its own Wiki page? of course it does, what doesn't?). More hippies and nerds of various descriptions lined the walls of the mall. The mystery was solved when I got to the Apple store and remembered about the iPhone (looks like Apple has an employee in charge of editing wiki pages).

I went into the Apple Store to look around. I've never been to an Apple store before but I figured it couldn't be very different than any other of the countless computer stores I've ever been in. Boy was I wrong.

Have you ever seen an iPod? It was like that but in retail form. Everything was clean and white and perfectly proportioned and beautifully lit. The bright lights illuminated squeaky clean, helpful, knowledgable, interestingly multiculti staff. I looked at some of the computers there. Did you know that Apple laptops only have one mouse button? How the hell does that work? And the computers look pretty, like desk lamps designed by Frank Gehry. What in the hell? Computers need to look big and clunky and kludgy and functional, like they came out of the boiler room of a Russian submarine. This place looked like Dell had been bought by Ikea.

What a good metaphor. I need to write that down somewhere.

My cellphone is the Motorola Q. It's PC based, with Windows CE (which means it crashes about three times a week, badum-pshh!). It's very awesomely cool, and I get compliments on it wherever I go.

Okay, that last part was a filthy rotten lie. But I still like having a cellphone with an enormous screen and a full sized keyboard and a 1.3 megapixel camera and rotten battery life and the ability to hack into the registry and change stuff.

Mrs Chainik couldn't understand why people would stand in line for a $500 cellphone.

The lonely, misunderstood life of a nerd, I suppose. If only they had girlfriends.

On a related note, some lady in Texas decided to buy a whole big bunch of iPhones so she could sell them on eBay. She got $10,000 in cash and drove to an Apple store, where she paid the nerd who was first in line $800 cash to take his place.